Technical conference 2014 – remote summary

Unfortunately I am not able to attend the Microsoft Dynamics AX Technical conference this edition. The contents of this conference is totally focused on Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3 which is expected to be released within 2 months. I was able to be part of the beta program for testing this new version and already had a look on the new features.

Now the Technical conference is started, all news are coming out via several blog sites and also on Twitter. Some interesting announcements were made during the keynotes and some sessions. This blog post will contain some summarized information of the AX news from yesterday and already some sessions from today. It also contains some valuable links to information from the Technical conference and AX 2012 R3.

First of all: The R3 release is a typically functional release. Many features will be added like Warehouse management, Transportation management, Demand forecasting, Retail enhancement, Master data management. The number of changes in the product are comparable with the changes made from AX2009.

Some words were given on the AX7 release. This version will be namely focused on technology. The data model and codebase of AX 2012 R3 will be used in this version. So the investments which will be made in this R3 release will not be lost or will have not that big impact as moving from AX4 or AX2009 to AX2012.

Some enhancements within Lifecycle services are expected. If you use the Business Process Modeler the gaps can be transferred to gaps within Team Foundation Server. Also it is possible to create a reproduction from your AX environment in Lifecycle services. Within this environment you can create reproduction scenarios for Microsoft engineers to help finding causes of errors.

Another new feature is Master Data Management. It is possible to exchange master data from several AX environments, but also other data sources, like SAP. The MDM is based on Data Import/Export Framework (DIXF) and Master Data Services within SQL Server. You will need to have an enterprise version of SQL to be able to setup Master Data Services. Probably an update for AX 2012 R2 CU7 will also be released. There will be a support for 5 entities out of the box: Customers, Vendors, Products, Global address book and Employees. Creating new entities for MDM is a minor customization in DIXF.

Information on internet

There are many tweets on the internet about the Technical conference. I created a daily newspaper on Paper.li which will gather these tweets for you. Of course you can explore Twitter yourself as well.

On LinkedIn there is a new group available for sharing news and start discussions about Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3. Join this group and learn and explore more about this coming release.

Also very interesting to know is that the content of the Technical conference 2014 is already available on Informationsource. A bit odd is that all session content is named with the pattern TC2013.

That’s all for now. Till next time!